Class blog for Anth 249: Evolution and human disease. We will be responding to class readings and engaging with the wider network of blogs and online content on evolutionary medicine. We might also make up some fun projects along the way.

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

(Searcher) Ancestral Heart Disease

Just a few weeks ago, Eryn Brown of the Los Angeles
Times reported in this article that researchers conducted CT scans of mummies which ended up showing them
predisposed to cardiovascular problems. This article somewhat challenges the
week’s readings, particularly the causes of heart disease and the general
presence of heart disease in our ancestors. In Chapter 21, Weil claims that atherosclerosis
and congestive heart failure are primarily a result of agriculture and industry, our
letting go of “ancestral lifestyles”, and our unhealthy modern environments.
She states, “Epidemic heart disease was certainly not commonplace in…our past
as a species. The reason our ancestors did not develop CHF is that the modern
risk factors for heart diseases were all but absent in our ancestral
environment.”

While it is true that our modern lifestyles have not
exactly taken a turn for the healthier, researcher Caleb Finch notes, “There
may be no environment or lifestyle which could eliminate atherosclerosis.” The
mummies studied were “Egyptians who lived between 3100 BC and AD 364; pueblo
dwellers who lived in what is now Utah between 1500 BC and AD 1500; Peruvians
who lived between 900 BC and AD 1500 before Europeans arrived in South America;
and Aleutian hunter-gatherers who were alive in the pre-industrial period
around AD 1900” – non-Western inhabitants who were unlikely to have high-fat
diets. Due to the findings of “calcium
deposits of atherosclerosis in mummies from all four cultures” in the
same places of the body, the researchers claim that age is the main
factor that increases cardiovascular disease in both our ancestors and our
modern selves. However, this study did not discover anything about the ultimate
CHF in our ancestors (consistent with the reading), nor did it claim that heart
disease was as much of an epidemic as it is today.